Abstract
Socioeconomic status and personality have always been seen as the important factors in social life. This study examines the relative effects of socioeconomic status and personality on subjective well-being in Taiwan. Data are from the 2009 Taiwan Social Change Survey, specifically its section on social inequality. The results indicate that after taking into account the effects of relative income, absolute personal and family income do not exert significant effects on life satisfaction and happiness, while relative personal and family incomes are highly significant. They also underscore the importance of socioeconomic characteristics in addition to income when analyzing life satisfaction and happiness, since the effect of class (measured as subjective class position) as well as that of income (measured as relative income) each plays an important role on subjective well-being. Combined, the results indicate that socioeconomic status (both income and class) exerts a much stronger effect than that of personality on subjective well-being among Taiwanese.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by a project entitled ‘Temporal and Cross-National Analysis of Quality of Life: The Effects of Socioeconomic Status, Working Conditions, Personal Characteristics, and Social Relations.’ From the National Science Council to Hsiu-Jen Yeh (NSC 101-2410-H-194-070). Additional support came from a Tunghai University GREEnS project entitled ‘Enhancing the Quality of Life and Living Environment in an Ageing Society.’ Many thanks to the reviewers for their constructive suggestions. We thank Li-Hsueh Wu and Tzu-Chuan Tsai for their excellent work of data computing.
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Yeh, HJ., Hsieh, YS., Tsay, RM. (2015). Self-Evaluation Affects Subjective Well-Being: The Effects of Socioeconomic Status and Personality in Taiwan. In: Maggino, F. (eds) A New Research Agenda for Improvements in Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 57. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15904-1_6
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